Seven protesters arrested while blockading Creech Assassin Drone Base…Just a week later over75 Somali militants were killed in a single U.S. drone attack!

On Thursday, October 4, as part of this fall’s CODEPINK weeklong anti-drone protest at Creech Assassin Drone Base, seven protesters and a couple of supporters bravely stepped across the base entrance road to temporarily “halt” the cruel and illegal U.S. Air Force’s “remote killing machine” located in the beautiful Nevada desert. While holding large banners across the roadway, our voices repeatedly called out as loudly as we could muster: “STOP the murder, STOP the War Crimes……The People Demand Peace!”

Early on the morning of October 24, a group of Trident Ploughshares activists from across the U.K. converged on Burghfield Atomic Weapons Establishment near Burghfield. They blocked approach roads, preventing workers from entering.

Hidden in the leafy lanes of Berkshire, Burghfield A.W.E. and its partner facility Aldermaston are where the U.K.’s nuclear warheads are planned and produced before being loaded onto lorries for trucking up public roads to the Trident submarine fleet in Scotland. The Mearings, a private road with access to the Main gate of AWE Burghfield, was blocked at both ends by a car with two people locked to it. The construction gate has a line of five people locked across it with their arms in lock-on tubes.

In rural northeast France, the 20-year resistance to a planned underground nuclear waste dump still flourishes, despite ongoing police and judicial intimidation. Government largess and a cultivated aura of technical and scientific respectability have coopted local governments, but the opposition has long tilled deep grassroots support.

Authorities have lately sought with no success to divide the opposition by targeting individuals accused of damaging the property of ANDRA, the nuclear waste authority. More were arrested and jailed this summer.

Two summers ago, ANDRA erected unpermitted concrete walls in the communal Lejuc woods, blocking access to the site where they plan to drill ventilation tunnels. The walls were pushed over in an act of collective public sabotage by hundreds of opponents in August, 2016. Fast-forward through two years of escalating struggle to February 22, 2018, when the “Owls” – resisters who had since lived in and among the trees of Lejuc – were forcefully evicted. Police patrols, surveillance and searches of area inhabitants intensified through the spring.

Undeterred, about 3,000 opponents from across France joined a day-long teach-in, march and rally on June 16 in the town of Bar-de-Luc.

UPDATE: August 17 – the jailed activist was released from custody today.

Among the many commemorative events all around the Peace Park in Hiroshima, Japan on August 6 was an evening memorial service for victims of both the Bomb and nuclear power by Go West, Come West. It is a civic association of evacuees from the March, 2011 Fukushima disaster and their supporters who are challenging the Japanese government’s response to the ongoing catastrophe affecting all of eastern Japan as inadequate and cruel.

This is their story about how police then arrested one of their members on trumped-up charges. [The headline of this post was corrected 8/15/18 to reflect that the jailed activist is a friend of Fukushima evacuees, and not herself an evacuee. The gender of the arrested person was also corrected from the error in the machine translation of this story.]

Emergency Statement on the Oppression at the Hands of the Local Police against the Fukushima Nuclear Evacuees’ August 6 Hiroshima Action.

Fugitive Italian anti-war activist Turi Vaccaro has been arrested and imprisoned in Gela, Sicily, where he will serve an 11-month, 27-day sentence.

Acting on a warrant issued in November, 2017, DIGOS, the Italian special police, determined that the well-known practitioner of nonviolent direct action would attend this summer’s annual NO MUOS protest camp near Niscemi. MUOS is the acronym of a Pentagon satellite relay station critical to U.S. war making in the Middle East and Africa. The massive dish antennas and transmission towers are planted on land cleared from a beloved cork-oak forest preserve, and their ultra high frequency radiation bathes neighboring residents.

Police observed Vaccaro among hundreds of others on the big August 4 march, where some demonstrators tried to bring down a section of chain-link and barbed wire fence only to be rebuffed by police firing tear gas.

The next day, as protesters relaxed and broke their camp, police decided to execute the warrant for Vaccaro’s arrest and imprisonment on a criminal damage conviction from 2015. When Vaccaro again approached the fence, DIGOS agents shouted at him to stop. Police gave chase on foot as the notoriously barefoot activist scampered away down the rural lane. About fifty activists quickly mobilized a cordon to slow the police pursuit, and Vaccaro disappeared into the countryside. Hours later, police reported his arrest as he hid in thick vegetation less than a mile away.

Activists honor Catholic archbishop, who was a prophetic voice for peace, on anniversary of atomic bombing

by Leonard Eiger

Silverdale, Washington: Activists blockaded the West Coast nuclear submarine base that would likely carry out a nuclear strike against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) should President Donald Trump give the order.

Activists with Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action held a vigil at the Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor Main Gate beginning on the evening of August 5th and continuing into the morning of August 6th, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Approximately sixty activists were present at the morning vigil, and twelve participated in a nonviolent direct action in which participants blockaded the base at the peak of the morning shift change by carrying a banner onto the roadway of the main entrance gate.

For four hours on Thursday, August 2, 2018, the Kings Bay Plowshares appeared before U.S. Magistrate Stan Baker in federal court in Brunswick, Georgia to argue that all charges against them be dropped. The peace activists set out six reasons why the charges of conspiracy, trespass, and two counts of felony damage to property should be dismissed. Fully detailed arguments are available at https://www.kingsbayplowshares7.org/

[This reflection was offered by Brian Terrell on July 29, 2018 to Catholic Workers gathered at Nazareth College, Rochester, NY, celebrating the 85th anniversary of the founding of the movement.]

Fifty years ago, in 1968, a time when state violence was running rampant in foreign wars and in the streets of our cities and when the reckless arrogance of insane men with power brought the world to the precipice of destruction, Dorothy Day drew from the tradition of the Industrial Workers of the World and offered a solution to the peril of the age- ‘Fill the jails!’ ‘Social betterment,’ Gandhi said earlier, ‘never comes from parliaments, or pulpits, but from direct action in the streets, form the courts, jails and sometimes even the gallows.’

On Sunday, July 15th 2018, eighteen people from four different countries cut through fences to reclaim German Air Force Base Büchel, which hosts about 20 U.S. nuclear bombs. The activists are from the USA (7), Germany (6), The Netherlands (4) and England (1).

The peace activists cut through razor wire and some other fences and several made it to the runway; three activists walked to a nuclear weapons bunker, and climbed up to the top where they were undetected for an hour. All 18 were eventually found by soldiers, handed over to the civil police, ID checked, and released from the base after 4-½ hours.

In the state of Georgia’s Glynn County Detention Center, four activists await trial stemming from their nonviolent action, on April 4, 2018, at the Naval Submarine Base, Kings Bay. In all, seven Catholic plowshares activists acted that day, aiming to make real the prophet Isaiah’s command to “beat swords into plowshares.” The Kings Bay is home port to six nuclear armed Trident ballistic missile submarines with the combined explosive power of over 9000 Hiroshima bombs.

This week, five people have gathered for a fast and vigil, near the Naval Base, calling it “Hunger for Nuclear Disarmament.”